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Chilly Office Space Limits Productivity

According to research carried out at Cornell University, working in a cooler office space can increase the productivity of staff, cutting typing errors by as much as 44% and boosting typing output by a whopping 150%.

In a month-long study, researchers testing the effects of increasing the temperature in an office space from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, studying and exploring the link between changes in office spaceΓÇÖs physical environment and work performance.

“The results of our studyΓÇ¥ explains Professor Alan Hedge of the universityΓÇÖs Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory, ΓÇ£also suggests raising the temperature to a more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about $2 per worker, per hour,”

In the study, which was conducted in the Insurance Office of America’s office space in Orlando, Florida, each of the workstations was equipped with a miniature personal environment-sensor for regularly sampling air temperature. The researchers recorded the amount of time that employees ΓÇ£keyboardedΓÇ¥ and the amount of time they spent making error corrections. Hedge used a new research approach employing software that can synchronize a specific indoor environmental variable, in this case temperature, with productivity.

“At 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the workers were keyboarding 100 percent of the time with a 10 percent error rate, but at 68 degrees, their keying rate went down to 54 percent of the time with a 25 percent error rate,” continues Hedge before concluding that. “Temperature is certainly a key variable that can impact performance.”